AbstractCuriosity is the latest rover sent to Mars as part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program. This talk provides an overview of the challenges of operating a roving science laboratory on Mars, current approaches and results, and discusses the upcoming Mars 2020 mission.

Host

Mumu Xu

BiographyVandi Verma is a Robotics Technologist in the Mobility and Robotics Systems section at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She graduated in 2005 with a Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University.

She is a senior rover driver and has been operating rovers on Mars for the past 10 years. She designed and implemented the flight software simulation for Curiosity robotic operations, and flight software for autonomous science. Previously she led the MEXEC and PLEXIL teams that developed on-board autonomy and formally verifiable plan execution for robotic missions.Her research work has been deployed on rovers in the Arctic, Antarctic and the Atacama. She is currently working on robotics flight software for Mars 2020 and leads the development of the flight software simulation for the rover.